Source:
The Register Analysts welcome Fusion Claw's tighter controls but warn of early adoption and cloud lock-in
Oracle's new Fusion Claw runtime could give customers more control over AI agents automating business processes, analysts say. But they warn that adoption remains at an early stage and customers risk becoming more tightly tied to Oracle's applications and cloud. Having promised "applications that can reason, decide, and act in pursuit of defined business objectives" back in March, Big Red has now introduced a runtime to govern their actions, running on its cloud and integrated with its Fusion applications. Oracle is targeting ERP, finance, and supply chain management with Fusion Claw for cloud-based Fusion applications running on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). It will be powered by frontier models including those from Google and OpenAI, with support for others planned over time. Oracle CEO Mike Sicilia said the company was trying to address the problem of getting "measurable value for our business" from AI investment. "Fusion Claw helps answer that question by moving from AI assistance to execution, enabling customers to automate increasingly complex work across their most important business processes, with enterprise-grade governance," he said. Analysts welcomed the move as a path that offers customers control and assurance in their
AI agentimplementations on Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications. A recent Gartner "first take" on Fusion Claw said the technology was a way to provision "isolated containers to execute heavy supply chain optimizations and subledger reconciliations within clear policy limits" rather than running local desktop scripts orchatbotprompts. "Instead of bolting AI onto legacy transactional back ends as a sidecarcopilotor UI wrapper, Oracle is rebuilding its application foundation around native agentic workflows," Gartner said. Other vendors should take heed of the move, the analyst said, because customers need to get away from prompt-based UIs and sidecar chatbots that only address routine data entry and basic task automation and offer "diminishing returns" that fail to justify enterprise AI spending. "AI horsepower should be pointed at the most complex operational challenges that were previously unsolvable inside core ERP systems, such as multi-echelon supply chain visibility, network design, sales and operations planning (S&OP), logistics routing, and loadoptimization," Gartner said. However, users trying to get these kinds of enterprise-scale applications hit a cost barrier because using an LLM to address thousands or millions of "transactional records, line items, or constraint variables… quickly becomes financially unviable at enterprise scale," it said. Oracle gets around the problem by separatingreasoningfromcomputeexecution. An agent evaluates context, assembles tools, and defines execution logic just once, the analyst said. Calculations and multivariable optimizations are delegated to deterministic compute engines, "avoiding passing millions of records through expensive LLM context windows." Isolated containers also offer specific authority limits, business object states, and policy guidelines. After execution, the system leaves hints to skip redundant paths and cut token consumption, Gartner said. Oracle is offering ready-made applications, including ones to improve readiness of financial ledgers, make staffing plans and consolidate shipping. Gartner recommends including Fusion Claw in requests for proposals (RFPs) for AI agent deployments, although Patrick Connaughton, chief of research, enterprise applications, warned that Fusion Claw was "very much in early piloting mode still." Fellow analyst company Forrester also welcomed Oracle's introduction of Fusion Claw, which is offered under per-user or per-employee pricing as well as consumption-based models. Principal analyst Craig Le Clair said: "Commercials are in line with the aggressive positioning from the tech industry. In our view, we have many trust issues to solve before agentic systems can be trusted to create tools and process patterns independently of designer's intent." However, in contrast with Fusion Claw's Oracle-only view of the world, enterprises have hybrid environments with AI agents built within cloud domains such as Salesforce and Oracle, process platforms like Pega or UiPath and frameworks like LangChain. "Cloud domains like Oracle are best suited for more generic, non-differentiating functions that the cloud domain knows well, while more complex and transformative custom agents should look toward custom agentic frameworks and the hyperscaler platforms," he said. Lock-in is an issue. While inspired by OpenClaw, Oracle's version is proprietary and tightly coupled to the Fusion platform, Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications running on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. "Enterprise architects are the key to avoid 'lock-in' with guidance on when to select a domain cloud over a more open platform above, pointing to data residency and external integration needs, for example. If the domain strength is strong enough, lock-in may be OK," he said. Organizations already heavily invested in Oracle may welcome tighter governance and potentially lower running costs. Those using a broader mix of suppliers may find the ties to Fusion and OCI harder to justify. ® Get AI news in your inbox
Daily digest of what matters in AI.